Google Cloud Vision

Over at Dexter Industries, John has been playing around with Google Cloud services, and in particular the Google Cloud Vision API. The API is able to take an image and then interpret it to determine what the camera is “seeing”. He’s written the whole thing up as a tutorial. Bear in mind that GCV is a paid-for service but there’s a 60-day free trial to try things out with. Take a look at the tutorial here.

Candy Sorter

Building on their experience with the API above, the good people over at Dexter Industries have come up with a great way of sorting through chocolate bars for Halloween. Using a BrickPi and LEGO pieces, they’ve created an automatic conveyor belt onto which you place your chocolate. The belt drops the individual bars into a basket which triggers the taking of a picture via the Pi camera. Google Cloud Vision is then used to identify the bar and it is then sorted into ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Lovely little project using a mix of technology. Take a look here or at the video below.